I am a careful writer. Not in the sense that my writing isn’t scattered with spelling errors and misuse of punctuation; but in the sense that I am careful about where I source my facts and how I attribute them. I have never been on the wrong end of the plagiarism stick, never accidentally, and certainly never deliberately – if I can’t do the work, I’ll chew on the failure that comes with that rather than be branded a charlatan and a cheat, and I certainly won’t get caught up in the victimisation of the careless.
TurnItIn is a system used by schools, colleges and other academic establishments to check for plagiarism and originality in works. It works by collecting up a huge database off the web of documents, essays, articles and the like, then comparing submitted documents with what it has on file. If there are blocks of text that are similar, either identical word for word or closely paraphrased, the submission is flagged as unoriginal and questions are no doubt asked of the author. When I read about TurnItIn, I thought “what an excellent idea” – finally, using the massive computing power and storage resources we have available in the Internet age, we can have a compendium of works that can be used to evaluate the originality supposed of new creations.
I then learned that TurnItIn has another feature – it actually collects work that have been submitted – so every student that writes an essay for a university that uses the service has their work put permanently on file for comparison with future submissions by other students. I began to consider the legal implications of this behaviour. Effectively, TurnItIn violates the copyrights owned by every student that has ever submitted a piece of work via their University or college. Just like a teenager that has amassed a huge quantity of stolen digital music from around the Internet, TurnItIn has collected a truly colossal volume of works. They aren’t just holding these works for themselves either – they are essentially monetising this collection by making it a cornerstone of their service – without this collected data, TurnItIn wouldn’t have such a strong selling point in this market.